Peter Klein of MediaWhiz, writing in Ad Age: Why
Do Not Track Will Make Online Advertising Better
(Seriously). Anti-tracking legislation will
make online advertising more focused and relevant to
consumers. It will set into motion a more innovative
and prosperous era of digital marketing, dominated
by a healthy respect for consumers' wishes about how
their data are collected and used, and innovative
advertising that meets their needs.

Good point. Placing ads on relevant content
can help everyone, but tracking individual users is just
creepy. Making the creepy side harder is just
what advertising needs. Klein writes, Do Not
Track will force marketers to be more creative in
their campaigns, tapping into legally available
data—users' expressed interests. This will
foster deeper and more relevant connections between
brands and consumers and benefit online advertisers
in the long run.

It all goes back to the signaling problem.
User tracking isn't just a problem because it
sets off people's creep radar. It's a problem
because, as soon as ads start being targeted
to the user, they stop pulling their weight. (part
1, part
2.) The more targeted that advertising gets,
the less well it carries out its essential role of
sending a signal about the advertiser's intentions
and resources. In media where user tracking
is impractical, the users give advertising more
attention.

In the long run, there are a couple of other points
to keep in mind.

First, better privacy tech isn't just good for
advertising, it's good for the content creators.
When advertisers have to target by interest, they
have to look for relevant content, instead of falling
down the adtech rat hole and chasing the desired
user onto the cheapest possible page. All but the
bottom-feeder content sites are likely to do better
under an improved privacy regime.

Ricardo Bilton for VentureBeat, in How
Do Not Track could destroy the Internet as you
know it, quotes Marc Groman, the director
of the Networking Advertising Initiative, who
says, Behavior-based advertising is absolutely
critical to the long tail....And if that goes away,
I don’t know how most websites are going to monetize
their content. Fair point, but I won't miss FunnyJunk.com.
Are any sites really both funding original content
and dependent on behavioral ads?

Second, DNT is a nice start for privacy tech, but
it's only the cornflakes in the complete breakfast.
Browsers have some design features, left over from
the dot-com 1990s, that might have seemed like a
good idea at the time but that feed the privacy
problems of today. Two of these misfeatures are information
leakage in the User-Agent header and the
policy for how the browser handles cookies
and scripts from third party sites. There's an interesting
proposal to fix the second one, but much work
remains to be done.

And now that we all know that privacy tech
is good for advertising, maybe we'll have
more interest from forward-thinking ad agencies in
making that happen. Ad agency-sponsored Internet
privacy lab, anyone?

Charles Stross writes,Corporations do not share our priorities. They are
hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who
join or leave the collective: those who participate
within it subordinate their goals to that of the
collective, which pursues the three corporate
objectives of growth, profitability, and pain
avoidance. But it's a little more complicated
than that...

Chris Dixon: Agency
problemsIf you are selling technology to large
companies, you need to understand the incentives
of the decision makers. As you go higher in the
organization, the incentives are more aligned with
the firm’s incentives. But knowledge and authority
over operations often reside at lower levels.

Steve Randy Waldman: Forcing
frequent failures (via Felix
Salmon and Stumbling
and Mumbling) Squirrels don’t lobby Congress,
when the ranger decides to burn down the bit of the
forest where their acorns are buried. Banks and their
creditors are unlikely to take “controlled burns”
of their institutions so stoically. If we are going
to periodically burn down banks, we need some sort
of fair procedure for deciding who gets burned, when,
and how badly.

Warren Ellis: How To
See The Future. The most basic mobile phone
is in fact a communications devices that shames
all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and
handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his
fucking communicator and it couldn’t text or take
a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter
on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile phone
coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass
windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing
things happen by pointing at it with our fingers like
goddamn wizards.

David H. Freedman: The
Rise of the Robotic Workforce. Called Baxter,
it is a humanoid robot that has the potential to be
everything Brooks was shooting for: a breeze to use,
capable of handling any number of basic assembly-line
jobs, and ridiculously cheap.

John Naughton: Google's
self-guided car could drive the next wave of
unemployment. [Google] engineers have
demonstrated that with smart software and an
array of sensors, a machine can perform a task of
sophistication and complexity most of us assumed would
always require the capabilities of humans. And that
means our assumptions about what machines can and
cannot do are urgently in need of updating.

Hanna
Rosin: are men an endangered species?The story
was no longer about the depths men had sunk to; that
dynamic had been playing out for several decades and
was more or less played out. The new story was that
women, for the first time in history, had in many
ways surpassed them.

Timothy B. Lee: Restrictive
Zoning Is Crippling Silicon Valley’s Transit
Options. People like me who would like there
to be more dense, walkable neighborhoods in America
face a kind of chicken-and-egg problem. Achieving
the necessary density requires a significant
fraction of people to give up their cars. Living
without a car is only practical in areas that are
well-served by transit. But a good transit system is
only economically viable in metropolitan areas that
already have significant density.

Washington's Blog: Cowardice
Is Destroying America. The courage of the men
at Valley Forge was also a turning point in the war.
Slogging on through the dead of winter without shoes
inspired a nation. On the other hand, cowardice
makes people stupid and docile.

Linux
on the (consumer) DesktopMy punch-line is
that the Linux Desktop faces a huge and multi-factored
ecosystem challenge, there is no single simple issue
to fix.

Jonathan Corbet: Bazaar on
the slow track. Bazaar, as a project, may not
be dead, but it shows signs of going into a sort of
maintenance mode.

Dave Winer: Manifesto:
Un-Web 2.0. (via Phil
Windley's Technometria) In Un-Web 2.0 you
get full control of your data, and the services just
get pointers to it, or copies of it. The originals
live with you. Pointers are much preferable to copies
because then you can keep updating the content after
it has been incorporated in someone else's content
tree.

Jean-Marc Valin and Timothy B. Terriberry: It’s
Opus, it rocks and now it’s an audio codec
standard!Opus is the first state of the art,
free audio codec to be standardized....Opus is the
result of a collaboration between many organizations,
including the IETF, Mozilla, Microsoft (through
Skype), Xiph.Org, Octasic, Broadcom, and Google.

Prof. Gary S. Becker: Reforming
the Patent System Toward a Minimalist System.
It has long been recognized that patents impose
costs on society since patents keep out competition,
so that the monopoly power of patent holders enables
them to raise prices and lower outputs. However,
until recent years many other costs of the patent
system received little attention, including
paradoxically that this system might in fact
discourage innovations.

Jordan Weissmann: The
Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them).
[P]atent protections never stay small and
tidy. Instead, entrenched players like intellectual
property lawyers who make their living filing lawsuits
and old, established corporations that want to keep
new players out of their markets lobby to expand the
breadth of patent rights. And as patent rights get
stronger, they take a serious toll on the economy,
including our ability to innovate.

New release from
Perforce, where I work: Perforce Git Fusion (press
release, product
page). Now you can set up remixed Git
repositories for projects, and work in a custom
repo without worrying about extra tooling such as
submodules, subtrees, or "repo" scripts. A developer
at example.com might work in a single Git repository
that contains...

That developer's own in-house code

PNG versions of the artwork (a subset of a much
larger art collection handled in Perforce)

An open source project, let's call it libfoo.

That developer might do some work that touches both
in-house code and libfoo. (It all goes in with one
commit and push.) Without remixing, it would be a
pain to extract the libfoo stuff and upstream it,
so you end up with a forked libfoo hanging around,
making
life miserable.

But we're remixing here. So we can also keep a
regular libfoo Git repository around, using Git
Fusion as a remote. When I pull from Git Fusion
here, I get a new commit with just the libfoo work.
And since this is just a regular git repo, we can
also run a tracking branch of upstream's master.
So we can rebase that commit onto whatever branch
upstream wants it, rewrite the commit message
to be relevant and not specific to in-house code,
and contribute normally via patch or pull request.
This is where we can clean up this commit to match
libfoo's "guidelines for contributors" without
affecting the original.

Easy for everyone to do in-house work that touches
the open-source dependencies, and easy to extract
and contribute what is upstreamable.

Lisa Knepper: How
Licensing Laws Kill Jobs. Jestina Clayton is
the type of entrepreneur we should be encouraging if
we want to put more Americans back to work. Instead,
the state of Utah shut her down.

Prof. Mahmoud El-Gamal: American
Muslims, Freedom of Speech, and Cultural Divides.
One area that is clearly a point of conflict
between current American norms and current Islamic
norms pertains to freedom of speech on revered
religious figures, and those on both sides who wish
to escalate a clash of cultures have been exploiting
this point of conflict unrelentlessly.

Timothy B. Lee again: Washington’s
Wealth Is About Changing Norms, Not Engaged Rich
People. Washington a half-century ago had
much stronger norms against public officials becoming
influence-peddlers. That meant lobbying firms had much
less influence over the legislative process—both
because fewer of them were former public officials and
because many fewer people still in public office were
contemplating second careers on K Street. As a result,
lobbying firms couldn’t offer their clients the
same bang for the buck they can offer today....

Just relax and use Go? Go
at Conformal.The contract Go offers is
simple, you do things our way and the rewards will
be great. You use the prescribed directory structure,
you get collaboration and a build system for free. You
name simple go programs that have _test appended
to the filename, you get unit test and performance
analysis for free. You use comments in a certain
way, you get documentation for free. No more arcane
makefiles and crappy scripting languages.

Mozilla Persona released.
This helps to deal with a key Internet security
problem. What are people bad at? Remembering
strings of characters. What does the security of
many sites depend on? Making people remember strings
of characters.

Sunday morning essays: employment, news, the New Aesthetic, and pirates

Kevin Carson: Contract
Feudalism. Employers (especially in the
service sector) are coming to view not only the
employee’s laborpower during work hours, but the
employee himself as their property.

Joel Gascoigne: The power
of ignoring mainstream news. When I first
started ignoring news, I felt that I was simply making
an excuse, that if I had more time I should read the
news. Today, however, it is a very deliberate choice
and I feel consistently happier every single day due
to ignoring the mainstream news.

Will Wiles: The
machine gaze (via Warren
Ellis) Converging, leapfrogging technologies
evoke new emotional responses within us, responses
that do not yet have names